The life of an intellectually ambitious writer has become much more difficult than it was just a single generation ago. The problem is not just that it has become harder to make a living in my field (it has), but also that, on many of the most pressing issues of our day, it has become impossible for writers to follow their true convictions, which is where the joy really lies.

As Saul Bellow wrote in his preface to The Closing of the American Mind, good writing requires that the author “be immune to the noise of history”. But thanks to social media, the noise of history is right there on a writer’s desk, buzzing with compliments and rebukes whenever you publish anything. Most young writers I meet seem so terrified by the prospect of having their work denounced as retrograde in these public forums that they hew to subjects and postures they know will attract approving comments (or, at the very least, no comments whatsoever).

Bloom described his students as being taken up with a “disdain for the ethnocentric” — an impulse that now might be more commonly described as anti-racism. As he rightly noted, this trend originated as a virtuous corrective to the “real prejudices of race, religion [and] nation” embedded in the fabric of white societies. But since Bloom’s time, the anti-racist movement has expanded vastly in scope, and now serves as the central unifying principle in the intellectual life of elite college students — far eclipsing complex (and less Tweetable) creeds such as socialism and anti-globalisation. This is why their online debate and virtue signalling now feeds almost entirely off expressions of anti-racist (or anti-sexist, or anti-transphobic) outrage. Such outrage is a precious commodity, as it provides daily affirmation that participants are engaged in prosecuting an important historical mission. Its function is social as much as political, for it is often the only thing holding these online tribes together.

This helps explain why it is now so difficult for an editor to recruit young people willing to express original views — since no one wants to write anything that gets them thrown out of a tribe they’ve inhabited, in good standing, since college, or even high school. In this respect, white writers tend to exhibit the highest levels of anxiety, since they (correctly) believe they have the most to lose if they come under any suspicion of heresy. In some cases, they will even decline offers to appear on panels, or refuse writing assignments, lest they be accused of occupying bandwidth better ceded to people of colour.

At my last job — editor-in-chief for a Canadian literary magazine — I observed this impulse being carried to almost comical extremes. In one case, I was thwarted in my attempts to commission a review of a book by an Indigenous writer — because my colleagues believed that such a book could not be properly reviewed by a white person. It had to be written by an Indigenous writer, they explained, and the review had to be positive. And so a week was spent trying to find an author of the appropriate ethnicity and outlook. None was found, and so the book was not reviewed at all. Dozens of others promising ideas died in this way.

This is an excellent piece of criticism, and well written. In one place, however, I think Kay gets it wrong. He writes, "no one wants to write anything that gets them thrown out of a tribe they’ve inhabited, in good standing, since college, or even high school." Logically, and based on my own behavior, it's less about the spoiling of longtime allegiances than is about maintaining the ability to publish in a wide variety of outlets in the future, given the fact that one's entire bibliography is just a few keystrokes away from an editor considering one's work. It's easy to blame reluctant writers, but keep in mind that an editor's willingness or unwillingness to consider the work of writers who have in the past expressed diverse, non-orthodox viewpoints is just as important, if not more so.

Lubomir Poliacik

October 31st, 20174:10 PM

I don't believe that describing Professor Allan Bloom as an "obscure academic" prior to the publication of "The Closing of the American Mind" is quite accurate.
When he taught at the University of Toronto in the 1970's he was something of an academic star, with a following of devoted student "Bloomites".
But more importantly, he was the most prominent expounder of the work of his former teacher, Leo Strauss.
You may recall that "Sraussians" in G.W.Bush's White House were held responsible by the liberal press for the invasion of Iraq, among other things.

Sal Scilicet

October 30th, 201712:10 PM

“Tell me where you come from and I will tell you what you are.” … We Jews have always been drawn to universalising creeds … the real community of man … of those who seek the truth … [where] the contact people so desperately seek is to be found.”
When I lived in Israel, “the land of the Jews”, the burning question was, who is a Jew? In other words, who is “the stranger within thy gates”? Namely, the “goyim” (the nations) – for whose welfare and wellbeing the Torah prescribes certain guarantees. That is to say – who, living among us, may be legally, morally, emotionally [and safely] ostracised … thereby deemed to be most certainly not “one of us”?
Whenever the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ [what it “means” to be me] comes up for discussion, the question of language is always deftly circumvented. Without hesitation or disquiet the words are taken for granted as representation, “standing for” something that is somehow assumed to exist quite independent of the text.
But what is one to make of “The American Mind”? The vocabulary, grammar and syntax, of any language, determines, equivocates, defines, delimits, confines and rigorously dictates what can be said and what cannot. Ever since language evolved, grammatically logical dictums nave been habitually deployed to “make sense” – logically coherent narratives, that barely resemble lived experience.
When “I” say what time it “is”, “I” am stating an indisputable, albeit fleeting, fact. [The present moment “now” has no dimension.] Just one of innumerable facts, with which each speaker/writer habitually confirms “the world as it is”. A popular, inescapable conceit. “Reality” can hardly be defined as a comprehensive catalogue of facts.
Hence all the familiar rhetorical conventions – happiness, time, democracy, The Universe, gravity, economics, philosophy, freedom, humanity, civilisation … Without ever having to explain what any of the words mean. Not to mention such evocative confabulations as, “mind”, “personality”, “consciousness”, “awareness”, “soul” …
Such is the beguiling, indispensable utility of language, that everybody knows what gravity “is”. What time “is”. What happiness and freedom “are”. Even though no two eminently useful, precise definitions will ever be exactly alike.
Of course, if language really were such a reliable means of communication, establishing “The Whole Truth”, and nothing but the real nature of “Reality” … there would have been no irresistibly lucrative need, all these years, for those lawyers, theologians and academics … not to mention all those millennia of bloodshed.
Whence this reluctance to examine the ineluctable function of grammatically regimented language? As thoroughly indispensable as it undeniably is – and at once so notoriously ambiguous – this wilful refusal is truly remarkable, just to glance but once through Galileo’s glass. Has the universal ‘group-think’ as to the wholesale disparagement of all things ‘post-modern’ become so deeply ingrained as to finally render such erstwhile provocations as Bloom’s, ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ thoroughly done and dusted?
The incontrovertible conventions of public discourse create the persistent illusion that if, for example, the subject is ‘happiness’, then obviously happiness not only exists somewhere outside the strict confines of vocabulary, grammar and syntax. But the thing can actually be actively ‘pursued’. Much like ‘Life and Liberty’, inalienably made freely available, for all to have and to hold. Don’t we know? “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. But nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, if it’s free.”
Whereas, while every individual person, once legally defined and duly promulgated by the State, as a solitary, self-determined moral agent, is thus, merely by dint of the rigours of literacy, privately persuaded that “I sure-as-hell know what happiness is”, not one is able to clearly define that most illusive of qualities for a certainty, to the satisfaction of all. Ergo – “Publish and be damned.”
At the very real risk of ridicule, words such as ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ are just that, essential semantics. It seems to me part of the problem inherent to every language is that words are used to conjure – literally call into awareness – both abstract and concrete concepts alike. This invariably inspires the pervasive illusion that ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ are not only all of a piece, but also equally tangible.
Suppose notions of ‘the self’, ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’ and ‘awareness’ are none other than indispensable, socio-culturally habituated, linguistically constructed figments of the imagination. Most words acquired during infancy as indisputable descriptors of experiential phenomena, such as ‘dog’ and ‘ball’, engender a deep-seated conventional belief that all words describe a grammatically signified experiential reality, whose ordinary apprehension is simply assumed to be common to all.
Meanwhile, intensely private experience is messy, irrational and illogical. Which, by its very ephemeral nature is quite literally inaccessible to the inflexible discipline of polite discourse. Instead of giving an accurate account of what really happened and what it was really like, each individual is obliged to construct a coherent narrative, in compliance with the ruling conventions of grammar and syntax, which is then understood as ‘history and ‘reality’.
Thus, common expressions such as, ‘changing my mind’, ‘going out of my mind’ and ‘The Closing of the American Mind’, create the illusion that ‘the mind’ is an experiential ‘fact of life’. And therefore routinely taken for granted as such.

Alex Kudera

October 30th, 201712:10 PM

Based on the author's ideas concerning Jewish writers as "the most influential and vigorous critics of liberal orthodoxy," I'm rebranding as Jewish and inviting critics to read Fight for Your Long and Auggie's Revenge in this tradition.

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